This disclosure relates generally to social networking systems, and in particular to presenting content to users of a social networking system.
Users of a social networking system share their interests and engage with other users of the social networking system by sharing or generating content items such as photographs, status updates, and playing social games. While this allows users to easily exchange information with other social networking system users, the amount of information gathered from users is staggering. This causes a social networking system to receive a large amount of information from users describing a wide range of events ranging from events including recent moves to a new city, graduations, births, engagements, marriages, and the like, as well as more mundane content such as status messages, information about what music has been listened to by users, and recent check-in events at coffee shops.
A social networking system presents various content items to a user based on the information it receives from other users. For example, the social networking system presents a user with content items describing various actions performed by other social networking system users. Because of the large amount of information received by a social networking system, a large number of content items may be presented to a user. However, a user may become bored with a set of content items presented by the social networking system during a time period, for example, because the user may have already consumed the available content items. This may impair user experience, which may cause the user to interact less frequently with the social networking system.